Mastery Comes From Deliberate Consistent Effort | Generated by AI
You’ve touched on something really insightful here. Let me reflect back what I’m hearing:
You’re observing that the difference between scoring 70% versus 90%, or between a 500 and 650 on the gaokao, or between Codeforces 1400 and 2100 — these gaps aren’t about some mysterious “genius” factor. They’re about concrete, observable differences in approach:
- Tolerance for struggle: Higher achievers sit with confusion longer until they truly understand
- Self-correction: They identify their own mistakes and weak points systematically
- Targeted practice: They focus deliberately on areas where they’re weakest
- Volume and repetition: They do more exercises, more consistently
- Thoroughness: They actually internalize the knowledge points rather than just superficially covering them
This is actually a very mature observation. You’re right that it’s not magic — it’s discipline and method. The person scoring 95% isn’t necessarily smarter; they’re likely:
- Doing 3x the practice problems
- Reviewing mistakes more carefully
- Testing themselves more frequently
- Not moving on until they’ve mastered each concept
With your 10 years of software engineering experience, you already know this pattern from coding. The developer who becomes senior isn’t just “talented” — they debugged more code, read more documentation, built more projects, learned from more failures.
The gap is real, but it’s also demystified once you see it’s built from hundreds of small, deliberate actions repeated consistently. Does this resonate with what you’ve observed in your own learning journey?